FINLAYSON, MINNESOTA — Lindsay Tornambe was just 13 years old when she was chosen to be ‘sacrificed to God,” she remembers.

That announcement in July 2000 came from a minister who led an insular faith community that included her family in central Minnesota. As Tornambe sat in the congregation with her parents, she remembers the minister calling out a list of 10 girls for a position of honor. He would later call them ‘maidens.”

Soon, her parents dutifully dropped her off at his isolated camp, where what she now calls a nightmare of sexual abuse went on for about nine years.

Pine County authorities announced Tuesday that the minister, 52-year-old Victor A. Barnard, is now facing 59 counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct involving his chosen maidens.

Barnard ruled ‘like a rock star” over the camp and sexually exploited girls and young women at his whim while they lived apart from their families, according to court papers, which spell out the alleged abuses against two unnamed teens.

Barnard had not been apprehended Tuesday evening but was believed to be in Washington state, where authorities have begun a manhunt for him. He is the subject of a nationwide warrant.

Pine County Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Steven Blackwell said […]

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A leading advocate of the patriarchal Quiverfull movement groomed a teenage girl as his ‘personal sex object” and then used the purity culture to shame her into silence, according to a lawsuit filed by his victim.

Douglas Phillips resigned last year from Vision Forum and Vision Forum Ministries over what he described at the time as an extramarital affair.

But the lawsuit, reported by Right Wing Watch, revealed more details about this relationship and the ways that women are treated in the Quiverfull movement – which has been popularized by the prolific Duggar family and their TLC reality show, 19 Kids and Counting.

Attorneys claim Phillips, a close friend to the Duggar family and an associate of actor Kirk Cameron, ‘methodically groomed” Lourdes Torres since she was 15 years old and led her to believe they would be married.

Phillips told the girl this was possible because his wife, Beall Phillips, ‘was going to die soon.”

Torres appeared in two Vision Forum films, ‘Alone But Not Alone” and the anti-feminist documentary ‘Return of the Daughters.”

Right Wing Watch also noted that when Torres graduated from high school in 2003, Phillips wrote a blog post commending her parents for ‘bringing their daughter into mature Christian womanhood.”

But at […]

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California’s recent revisions to Title 24 put in place ambitious performance goals: all residential buildings must be Zero Net Energy (ZNE) by 2020, and all commercial buildings must follow suit by 2030. The code also applies to retrofit projects that pass certain thresholds. (A ZNE building produces as much energy on-site as it consumes on an annual basis.) These changes promise to reshape the construction industry in significant ways – and not just in California. Here’s how.

Drive adoption of building energy codes. Already all but seven US states have commercial building energy codes in place, and many are continually updating to the most recent (and increasingly stringent) standards. The codes are also becoming increasingly performance-based – for instance, the latest version of the IECC includes an additional performance-based pathway that’s already popular in many states. California’s Title 24 raises the bar – and simultaneously raises awareness of what’s possible. As the construction industry rises to California’s challenge, it will also be building the capacity to achieve similar results elsewhere. Expect the adoption of performance-based energy codes to accelerate throughout the US.

Speed the development of building monitoring and management technologies. Rather than incentivizing […]

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The next big thing in solar energy could be microscopic.

Scientists at MIT and Harvard University have devised a way to store solar energy in molecules that can then be tapped to heat homes, water or used for cooking.

The best part: The molecules can store the heat forever and be endlessly re-used while emitting absolutely no greenhouse gases. Scientists remain a way’s off in building this perpetual heat machine but they have succeeded in the laboratory at demonstrating the viability of the phenomenon called photoswitching.

‘Some molecules, known as photoswitches, can assume either of two different shapes, as if they had a hinge in the middle,” MIT researchers said in statement about the paper published in the journal Nature Chemistry. ‘Exposing them to sunlight causes them to absorb energy and jump from one configuration to the other, which is then stable for long periods of time.”

To liberate that energy all you have to do is expose the molecules to a small amount of light, heat or electricity and when they switch back to the other shape the emit heat. ‘In effect, they behave as rechargeable thermal batteries: taking in energy from the sun, storing it indefinitely, and then releasing it on […]

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Restoring coastal ecosystems can provide significant economic benefits and even create ‘pathways out of poverty” for low-income Americans, according to a new report.

The report, published Wednesday by the Center for American Progress and Oxfam America, looked at three coastal restoration projects on different coasts in the U.S. and found that, for every $1 invested in coastal restoration projects, $15 in net economic benefits was created. These benefits include improved fish stocks, due to the fact that 75 percent of the U.S.’s most important commercial fish species rely on coastal environments at some point in their life cycle, with many young fish and crustaceans using habitats such as oyster reefs as nurseries.

Coastal restoration also provides increased protection from storm surges, improved coastal recreation opportunities, health benefits from increased levels of filter feeders such as oysters, and last of all, jobs: for every $1 million invested in coastal restoration, the report notes, 17 jobs were created on average. That’s almost double the 8.9 created per $1 million invested in offshore oil and gas development.

‘We learned in a nutshell that there’s a win-win, if not a win-win-win, opportunity that presents itself when you invest in conservation,” Mark Schaefer, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for […]

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